Interview with Jock Sturges

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Naked Truth

Interview with Jock Sturges
(c) David Steinberg. All Rights Reserved.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

On April 25, 1990, a group of FBI agents and officers of the San Francisco
Police Department raided the studio of photographer Jock Sturges, seizing
his cameras, his prints, his computer -- everything relating to his work
as an internationally recognized fine art photographer, much of whose work
involves nude portraiture of children and adolescents. The law officers
discovered that they had taken on one of the art elite's own as art
communities, both in San Francisco and nationally, rallied around Sturges,
his work, and the legitimacy of respectful nude photography of children
and adolescents. Eventually, a San Francisco grand jury refused to indict
Sturges on any charges.

Now Sturges' work is again under legal attack. Grand juries in
Montgomery, Alabama, and Franklin, Tennessee, have indicted bookseller
Barnes & Noble on child pornography and obscenity charges for selling
Sturges' book, Radiant Identities, as well as the work of British
photographer David Hamilton. Grand juries have been impaneled in two
additional states and others may follow, according to Sturges. Supporters
of Randall Terry and his organization, Operation Rescue -- best known for
their protests against abortion clinics -- take credit for bringing the
books to the attention of prosecutors by such actions as physically
destroying books in Barnes & Noble stores.

"People need to realize that a cultural war has been declared here,"
Sturges says strongly. "A virulent, aggressive minority has decided that
Americans don't know themselves what it is they should see, and need to be
protected by people who are wiser than they are, even if they are only a
tiny sliver of the population. This represents a whole new level of
attention to the arts by repressive forces. It's very scary and it has to
be withstood.

"The state attorney general in Alabama, a man who is running for
re-election, postulates that my work is 'obscene material of people under
the age of 17 involved in obscene acts.' This is pretty chilling language
because, in fact, the people in my pictures are not engaged in any acts at
all. They are living in contexts that are naturist, which is to say that
when it's warm and people feel like it, they don't wear clothes. He finds
that, by virtue of the language of his indictment, somehow inherently
obscene."

"It's laughable and we'll win these cases, however far it has to go,"
Sturges continues. "If it gets to the Supreme Court, I'll have the
directors of every museum in the country as expert testimony that my work
is legitimate art. If obscenity is simply a matter of somebody being
without clothes, then there are so many other things that would be
inherently obscene -- medical books, the National Geographic."

Sturges does not relish being back in the legal limelight. Although the
indictments are not directed against him, his legal expenses will be
substantial. In the meantime, the turmoil pulls him away from his work
and his normal life. "It's a madhouse around here," Sturges says with
more than a little exasperation. "Thursday we had 140 phone calls."

As we are talking, the doorbell rings. Sturges stiffens. "I hate it when
that happens," he says with an edge.

"When what happens?" I ask.

"When the bell rings and I'm not expecting anyone. I still remember the
time that happened when it was the feds and the police who had come to
turn my life upside down."

The following interview was conducted between the time of Sturges'
encounter with the FBI and the current indictments:

Steinberg: You've said that you don't want to dwell on your legal
situation.

Sturges: Not really. The problem with being investigated as invasively
as I have been is that you run the risk of having that episode be the
defining event in your life. I have no desire to be defined by such
assholes, period. What I'm good at is making art. I became good at
defending myself, but as far as I am concerned, that was a transient
skill. It was an occasion I had to rise to. I'd rather get back to
making art than talking about it.

They came, they did not conquer, they went away, and they made me fairly
famous in the process. It's no small irony that the government inevitably
and invariably ends up promoting precisely that which they would most like
to repress.

Steinberg: Has that in fact happened to you?

Sturges: Well, yes and no. My work was doing pretty well before, and now
it is doing dramatically better. Is that because people are collecting
the pictures because of their notoriety? Or is it simply because people
are more aware of the work? I don't know. I'll never get to know.

It's really, really hard to make it as a fine-art photographer
exclusively. Now that I have, I'm permanently deprived of the pleasure of
knowing whether that's based entirely on my work's merit or whether that's
based on my notoriety. That's something that's been stolen from me that I
don't get back.

I've been taken to task by some critics for exploiting the whole
situation, but that was something I would never have chosen to have happen
to me. I have to some extent, perhaps, exploited it, but only because
living well was the single revenge presented to me, if that makes any
sense. To basically take the opportunity that the feds created for me
with their malicious intent and turn it into an advantage. That feels
really good. I went through terrible anguish, as [my work was] derailed
by the morbid preoccupation with other people's sexuality that the feds
impose on you.

All my life I've taken photographs of people who are completely at peace
being what they were in the situations I photographed them in. In very
many cases that was without clothes, and it simply was not an issue. They
were without clothes before I got there and they were without clothes when
I left. That was just a choice that they had made, one they didn't even
think about. They were simply more comfortable that way. It never
occurred to me that anybody could find anything about that perverse, which
is evidence of my having been pretty profoundly naive about the American
context. I'm guilty of extraordinary naivete', I suppose. But it's a
naivete' that I really don't want to abandon, not even now.

Steinberg: Having been through all that, I can't imagine how you can take
photographs now without having that somewhere in your mind.

Sturges: There are photographs that I don't take now, that I previously
would have taken without any thought at all as to any misinterpretations.
The truth is that people who are naturists, who are used to being without
clothes, are unselfconscious about how they sit around, how they throw
themselves down on the ground, how they sit in a chair, how they stand.
They don't think about it; it's not an issue. Before, I'd photograph
anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about
any part of the body. Now I realize that there are certain postures and
angles that make people see red, which are evidence of original sin or
something, and I avoid that. But it's difficult. At one point, Maia
[Sturges' wife] found me crossing legs, avoiding angles, giving
instructions which inadvertently were instructing young people that some
aspect of what they were doing, some aspect of who they were, was
inherently profane. I've had to relearn how I work with people so that if
I avoid different things I don't send those messages in doing so. I'm the
last person who has any desire to instruct anybody in shame. That's no
errand for me.

Steinberg: The semantics are tricky here, but I'm interested in whether
you see your work as erotic. I don't mean erotic as sexual and I don't
mean erotic as intending that people who look at your photos become
aroused. But certainly, when I look at many of your photos, when I look
at many of Sally Mann's photos, what I see is the natural eroticism of
children, or preteens, or teens.

Sturges: Western civilization insists on these concrete demarcations.
Before 18, sexually you don't exist; after 18, you exist like crazy. It's
ridiculous. The truth is that from birth on Homo sapiens is, to one
extent or another, a fairly sensual species. There isn't a person alive
who doesn't like being caressed. Children masturbate as early as
one-and-a-half or one- year old. They do it spontaneously and without any
thought that there's anything evil about making themselves feel good.
That's a sensual experience in their lives, one that should remain
entirely the property of the child, as it were.

Very naturally, the ages of consent in Europe are vastly lower than they
are here, in recognition of the fact that when you have people involved
with sexuality you may as well make it legal so you can better deal with
them about it, so they'll talk to you and you can educate them.

We're really blind in this country. People don't see the extraordinary
inconsistencies. I think the average age for the loss of virginity for
female children in this country now is something like 14-1/2 or 15.
There's a vast epidemic of unwed mothers and teenage mothers, and yet we
have an 18-year-old age of consent which makes them all felons. If the
age of consent were lower, you could talk to these children intelligently
and not have to worry about school boards and PTA's going apoplectic if
you mention the word "condom," let alone sex. As soon as you forbid
something, you make it extraordinarily appealing. You also bring in the
phenomenon of shame. I'm perpetually exasperated by the American take on
sexuality.

To give you a good example of a more intelligent way of doing business, in
the Netherlands, the age of consent, I think, is 13, and children younger
than that are not militantly discouraged from being sensual human beings.
It's not a libertine culture -- it's actually fairly conservative in some
ways -- but the Dutch quite intelligently recognize that people are
sexually active fairly young in their lives in this day and age. One of
the results of this is a fascinating demographic: The incidences of child
abuse in Holland are vastly less than they are here. Why? Because
children belong to themselves in that culture. If somebody aggresses them
-- touches them in a way that's inappropriate -- they'll talk [about it].
They're not ashamed to be physical human beings. Their physical privacy
belongs to them and they tell and sexual abusers are caught and stopped
and treated and dealt with.

In our society there's so much shame attached to sexuality that sexual
abusers here on the average have had something like 70 or 100 victims
before they're finally caught. In Holland the average is like three or
four because shame is absent and people tell much sooner. So when moral
crusaders raise [age of consent] limits, create still higher barriers,
they're getting the opposite of what they want. It's very shortsighted, I
think, to not understand better how the species works psychodynamically.

Steinberg: Focus a little for me on how that affects how you see your
work. Isn't what you're calling the sensuality of children, or pubescent
teenagers, a major part of what you go for, of what makes a photo of yours
work?

Sturges: I'm an artist who's attracted to a specific way of seeing and a
way of being. Any artist involved in their work is going to have a focus
in what they do. I am fascinated by the human body and all its
evolutions. The images I like best are parts of series that I've started,
in some cases, with the pregnancies of the mothers of the children in
question, and I continue that series right on through the birth of
children to the child that resulted from that first pregnancy. I have
series that are 25 years long. I recently photographed a woman with two
children whom I photographed first when she was the age of the older of
her children.

I have this naive and quixotic hope that in seeing the physical progress
from start to "no finish," from the beginning on, in looking at the body
in all its different changes -- looking at the fat-bellied babies, to
thinner children, they get straight, they get long, they become sticks,
they begin to develop, their hips go, the whole process matures -- that
people understand that the person occupying that body is more than just a
physical object. The pictures don't objectify: they're about the
evolution of personality and self as much as they are about the evolution
of the body. What stays the same is not the body, but character and
personality. These evolve and mature too, but there are certain ways of
standing, certain sets to the eyes, certain behavioral consistencies,
which you can see from the very youngest photographs. It's just always
there. It's fascinating to see what stays the same, and what changes.

My hope is that my work is in some way counter-pinup. A pinup asks you to
suspend interest in who the person is and occupy yourself entirely with
looking at the body, fantasizing about what you could do with that body,
completely ignoring how the person might feel about it. People who make
pinup photographs don't care who the woman is, what tragedies or triumphs
that person's life might encompass. My work hopefully works exactly
counter to that. My ambition is that you look at the pictures and realize
what complex, fascinating, interesting people every single one of my
subjects is.

Steinberg: Maybe the point is that you don't exclude or try to screen out
their existence as erotic, sensual beings, and that makes your work
striking because everybody else is screening that out.

Sturges: We're all taught that there are appropriate and inappropriate
ways to respond to the world. I, by good fortune, have managed to be
around a lot of people who have much looser rule structure than the rest
of us do. I'm still surprised when somebody finds one of my pictures
shocking.

Steinberg: Are you surprised when people find your photos erotic?

Sturges: No. Not at all.

Steinberg: And yet you seem to go out of your way to deny that the photos
are erotic, to disassociate from collections of photos that are erotic,
and so on.

Sturges: Let me also make an important distinction here. I will always
admit immediately to what's obvious, which is that Homo sapiens is
inherently erotic or sensual from birth. But that eroticism and
sensuality remain the property of the individual in question up until they
become sexually of age. It's arguable what that age is. If I said for
attribution that [coming of age sexually occurred] before 18 years old,
I'd be hung, drawn, and quartered in American society, whereas in Europe
it would raise no eyebrows at all.

But there's also something else. As soon as the system, or an individual
in the system, accuses another individual -- as I was implicitly accused,
because there were never any charges brought against me -- the accused is
forced into artificial polarities of political posture. As soon as
somebody says that you might be x, you have to immediately say, "Oh no,
I'm y," even if in fact the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I
found myself serving a sentence of public denial from the very second the
raid on my apartment happened. I had to pretend to be something that,
quite frankly, I'm probably not, which is a lily-white, absolutely
artistically pure human being. In fact, I don't believe I'm guilty of any
crimes, but I've always been drawn to and fascinated by physical, sexual,
and psychological change, and there's an erotic aspect to that. It would
be disingenuous of me to say there wasn't.

There it is; so what? That fascination pervades the species from the
beginning of time; people just admit to it to varying degrees.

One of the fascinating things for me has been to look at who the accusers
are, because invariably, when somebody becomes interested in your
sexuality, in your moral life, they're very often manifesting an attempt
to disguise disrepair in their own personal sexual life or morality. It's
what I call the trembling finger syndrome. If somebody's pointing a
trembling finger at your pants and saying you shouldn't be doing
something, follow that finger back, go up the arm and look at the head
that's behind it, because there's almost always something fairly woolly in
there.

Steinberg: How do you work with models, particularly young models, in a way
that does not appropriate their sexuality, their eroticism, their sensuality,
for adult purposes?

Sturges: The transactions between me and the people that I photograph are
very very collaborative. I know the families that I photograph extremely
well and have known them for a very long time. The kids really enjoy what
they do. I check with them constantly to make sure that they're really
happy to be there. I give them lots of outs so that the pressure of my
personality, which children find charming as a rule, does not force them
into doing things that they don't want to do.

Steinberg: How do you do that?

Sturges: I'm always saying, "Are you cold?" "Do you want to stop?"
"Have you had enough?" "I don't want you just to be here; I want you to
be really glad to be here." Language like that all the time.

Steinberg: Do they like posing?

Sturges: They adore it. Are you kidding?

Steinberg: What do they like about it?

Sturges: They like being taken seriously as people. After they've been
in the process for a while, they realize they get all the pictures that we
do -- the families get a copy of every photograph that I take -- and they
begin to really enjoy being thought of as beautiful. We live in an age
where anonymity is growing in magnitude like a bomb going off. As media
stars become increasingly powerful, the rest of us are increasingly
ciphers. The distance between the lives [of celebrities] and our lives is
growing all the time. Children feel absolutely invisible, unnoticed, and
as if they can make no difference. The more of the world we see in the
media, the more aware we are of how insignificant any one of us is.

Kids feel this, even if they can't articulate it in quite that way. Time
and again, when interviewed about being photographed, they talk about the
photography as a way of becoming less anonymous. They like the
admiration; they like the thought that somebody thinks that they can be
art.

Now, there's [also] what happens after the photographs are made. It's not
hard for me to imagine that there are some [people] who will buy my book,
buy my photographs, look at them and have "impure thoughts." There are
people out there who buy shoe ads, Saran Wrap, and all manner of things,
who have impure thoughts. I can't really do anything about those people,
except hope that, if they attend to my work closely enough, they'll
ultimately come to realize that these are real people.

What pedophiles and people who have sexual desires on children lose sight
of to a terrible, terrible degree -- a devastating degree -- is that their
victims are real people who will suffer forever whatever abuses are
perpetrated on them. If I'm able to make pictures of children that are so
real, as you follow the children growing up over the years, perhaps there
will be something cautionary in that visual example. The truth is that
every pedophile's victim eventually grows up and becomes an adult who will
turn around and that's when they get caught.

Steinberg: How does your policy of consent work for the models? I know that
you give them ongoing control over their images.

Sturges: Right. They control their photographs because I don't let them
sign model releases. I urge them never to sign a model release for
anybody unless they have been paid specifically to do a specific job on a
contractual basis, for an advertising agency or something. Who knows how
they're going to change? They might marry a Methodist minister from
Minnesota and have a very conservative life. At some point in the future
they might decide that these pictures embarrass them. The control
shouldn't be mine, it should be the kids'. This creates a very complex
life for me, I promise you. When I want to use a picture in a book, I've
got to call foreign countries, find people, explain the context. My phone
bills are astronomical sometimes.

Steinberg: Have you ever had people who have wanted you to pull pictures?

Sturges: I've had a number of American adolescents who, when they hit
high school, said "I really don't want to see these pictures published
right now," and they were immediately pulled. I took them out of the
galleries. They completely ceased to exist, as far as public [access to]
the images went. But when the kids were finished with high school they
have also said, "Don't worry about that, I just went through a stage and
it's fine now."

I did lose access to one picture, a picture of two kids in an inner tube,
that was going to be in Radiant Identities. I had permission to use it in
my first book, but when the child on the left [turned] 14, [she became]
very self- conscious about the fact that her bathing suit is a little low
in the picture. She declined to give permission for its publication,
which really thunderstruck me because it's such a sweet picture. But
that's who she is and so it won't be published, no question about it.
That's what she wants; that's what she gets, no argument. That's just
how I've always worked.

When I started doing my work years ago, I had doubts as to whether the
informed consent question was answerable. But empirically I've come to
understand that my photographs really don't do any harm. The way I found
that out is by virtue of the fact that a huge number of people that I've
photographed over the years have now come of age and are able to speak in
adult voices about the process. What they're saying is unanimous -- I
don't have any dissenting voices -- which is that they love the pictures.
They're really pleased that they exist, and they want me to photograph
their kids. If these people felt the least bit victimized by [the process
of being photographed], they wouldn't be having me do the same thing to
their own kids.

Some of these people were bugged by the FBI in the worst imaginable way.
They were interviewed very, very aggressively. Yet, they're all still
willing to let me take their pictures; they think the FBI was completely
full of it.

One of the things that a lot of people who look at photographs don't
understand, especially in terms of my work, is that 98% of the work that
goes into making a picture has to do with the social work you do before a
camera comes out. I spend a huge amount of time with the families that I
photograph. I'm very involved with their lives. I know a lot about them.
I could tell you long stories about these people, some of the tough things
that have happened in their lives, the triumphs, the tragedies, the whole
thing. It's only way into that process that I ever start taking any
pictures. That relationship has to exist [first].

Years ago, as a naive photographer, I'd see a pretty face and want to take
a picture. Empirically, over a long period of time, I learned that pretty
faces were just not enough, not even remotely enough. There has to be
somebody home behind the pretty eyes, somebody with whom I would want to
spend substantive amounts of time over a period of decades, bring them
into the family, as it were. Somebody who's vapid and vain and arrogant
is just no fun to hang around with, so why would I ever want a picture of
them? These days I very rarely approach new people. Mostly people come
to me, or I photograph the friends of people that I've photographed. If I
add anybody, it's part of a larger family network, as it were. [But] it's
extremely rare for me to begin with somebody entirely new, just because
the social work of adding on a whole new family takes that much more time.

Steinberg: People are always concerned about possible negative effects on
the kids of being photographed. But it also seems to me that the results
could...

Sturges: ...be beneficial. I can give you one very specific story about
that that I like a lot.

There's a picture in my first book, The Last Days of Summer, called Nicole
G, of a very long-legged German girl. This girl was tall, practically
from birth. She had long, long legs, so much so that she often walked
with a stoop because she was embarrassed by how tall she was. She's an
absolute knockout, a beautiful girl, but she never thought so because she
was embarrassed about being so big; she felt like an elephant.

I always loved how she looked and I like the family a lot. The father is
a major in the German army who just worships his kids. To him, they are
gods descended to earth. He doesn't overindulge them -- he is very smart
about how he has raised them -- but he loves them so much that it is
amazing. The mother is wonderful too. It is just a family with a lot of
love in it.

Well, the father agonized over the fact that Nicole hated herself, hated
how she looked, because he thought that she was the most beautiful young
girl in the history of civilization, as parents are wont to do. Then one
afternoon I had a shoot, the year after the picture in the book was taken,
where I worked with a bunch of tidal pools. I had beautiful light, the
family was in a great mood, and Nicole was in a superb place in her
transit through life. I gave her a lot of reinforcement as I worked,
telling her repeatedly -- it was absolutely true -- that she was doing
beautiful things. It was really fun, and I took a lot of really good
pictures.

It was very very high, very zen-like, in a very elevated place. I made
nothing but good pictures. In basketball terms, you'd say I was in the
zone. I couldn't miss. Nicole was being just magnificent. Everything
she did had grace in it. She couldn't sit down and pick her nose without
it being beautiful. And she was normally kind of angular, because of how
long her legs and her arms were.

That evening, as I was leaving, Dieter, the father, came over just as I
was going to get into the car. He had tears in his eyes. He gave me a
great big kiss, which I'm not that used to receiving from men. And he
said, "Jock, Nicole has just for the first time in her life told me that
she thinks she's pretty."

That afternoon, for her, was what the French call a date change'. It was
a changing point for her. Her sense of self and self-esteem changed
dramatically that afternoon, and I felt absolutely ecstatic to have been
part of that.

Steinberg: Another photographer I know who has worked with teenagers and
young women, says that sometimes he's concerned that he may be leading
these people in a difficult direction because they get so much into how
they look that they can then get into the whole glamor model thing.

Sturges: I've only once had a model go in that direction, and she was on
her way there before I met her, a remarkably narcissistic human being.
The principal way I work is that I tell people not to move when they're
doing something that I like. It's almost always something improbable,
which is to say not a glamor pose, not the arms behind the head, not that
kind of thing. The message is that who you are naturally is what I like
the best.

Almost always, I'll get my best pictures when everybody thinks the shoot's
done. I'll spend five or six hours at the beach with people, and when
they think I'm all out of film they really relax and I get my good
pictures. Hopefully the message is that you're most admirable when you're
human, that you don't have to pose and put on make-up and be glamorous.

No two people take on the information of being admirable and being admired
in the same way. I can't begin to know the psychological ramifications of
what I do in the long run. I won't live long enough. It may be that the
most important ramifications of what I do will come when my models are in
their 60s and 70s, when they look very different from the way they look in
the pictures now, when they will have the photographs as a reminder. It
may be that that reminder will be painful. I hope not. I hope they can
continue to accept themselves and their bodies as beautiful as they change
and grow. Some of the people that I photographed as sticks have become
much more voluptuous, much rounder, in some cases dramatically so, and I
think they're even more beautiful. Some are in their 30s now and their
bodies are beginning to obey gravity's halcyon call, and I think they're
more beautiful because now they're the origins of other people, of
children themselves. Their beauty is flowing back into their own
children. To me that illuminates them and illuminates the children as
well. It's just all part of the same circle.

Physical beauty is such a strange thing. Homo sapiens happens to think
that certain things are beautiful. [People in] different cultures think
[different] things are beautiful. The Japanese used to paint their teeth
black. There will never be any end to the variations on what we find
aesthetically appealing. But the fact that we have an aesthetic sense is
part of what separates us from the lower animals. There's no evidence
that any other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo
sapiens does, always has, and always will.

Steinberg: Obviously your own pursuit of beauty has a lot to do with youth.
So what is it about young people that you find so beautiful?

Sturges: There's line, there's androgyny, there's a lot of different
things. I've undone the psychological puzzle that is me, and it's not a
very complex one. I was sent away to boarding schools when I was very,
very young and it wasn't a lot of fun. So I'm particularly fascinated by
that age, the age of my own traumatization, as it were.

Steinberg: I didn't mean the psychoanalysis of it. I meant what is about
these people that really grabs you. You could be photographing
40-year-old people, or 70-year-old people....

Sturges: Well, beyond what I've just said, about what it was that lit the
fuse on this work, I'm not really that worried about knowing.

Steinberg: I don't mean what it is about you.

Sturges: I'm letting you know why it is I like what I like.

Steinberg: But what is it you like?

Sturges: It's so different every time, because it evolves. I'm working
with a lot of people now who are considerably older than I used to work
with, because a lot of these kids have literally drawn me up through their
lives. I've come to understand that they're even more interesting company
and more interesting to photograph -- they're more interestingly complex
-- when they're older, when they're in their early 20s and starting to get
involved in relationships that may result in children.

When I enter a room, there's always a face or two that will stop me.
Everything else is invisible to me; I don't see the other people that are
there. There's a certain purity of line. You see the same obsession
taken almost to the point of kitsch, in the English school of painting,
the pre- Raphaelites. The best of pre-Raphaelite painting is just divine
-- very, very pure. You see it in Botticelli, and then you see it in a
very different, bitter, beautiful form in the work of my favorite painter,
Igon Schuyla.

Steinberg: So it's a matter of line and form for you? Is there something
about the person?

Sturges: There's ballet in it; 15 years of ballet. For me, the ideal
model is somebody who is full of energy and generous and warm -- who is
engaged, and engaging. Someone who has pretty line, clear line, and who
is also at peace with herself, that is to say unselfconscious and
delighted to be the physical animal that he or she is.

Steinberg: Is this something we lose when we get older?

Sturges: No, it just changes. It depends on what society does to people,
but it does change. It becomes something larger. In some cases, because
society can be a searing influence, it's burned out.

Steinberg: Ron Raffaelli, who has also done a lot of photography of young
people, talks very explicitly about the sense of innocence, the way of being
in your body before you associate it with sexuality and therefore with being
"bad," that he finds stunning. He just loves the way young people inhabit
their bodies.

Sturges: Lewis Carroll made a similar distinction. He thought that
children were absolutely beautiful before puberty, but after, they were
essentially lost, corrupted by the emergence of sexuality. I've never
been able to identify with that perception because to me the people are
the same people. That child remains within. The innocence is there, it
just takes on a different guise. The people who I most like to
photograph, the people who have been "great models" for me, are the ones
who have maintained and nurtured that innocence throughout their lives.
Marine, the girl on the cover of my book, is an immensely warm, impulsive,
spontaneous human being who acts today, at 20, just the way she did when
she was seven. Her mother, who's in her 40s, is the same way. The last
time I was visiting them in central France, Marine and her mother ran the
entire length of the train platform, waving goodbye to the train I was on.
Their faces were full of color and joy. It's possible to be that way
[throughout your life]. That loss, that fall if you will, is not
inevitable. I hope that my photography can become a small engine in the
lives of people as they undergo these transitions, to help preserve the
purity that's always there.

For me, there's [also] an innocence and a beauty that returns to women,
however much it might have been eclipsed by social burdens, when they
become pregnant and have their own children. It's so beautiful that it
often makes me cry. I get totally romantic and ridiculous.

Steinberg: Do you photograph pregnant women?

Sturges: I've done a little. I want to do more. What I'm beginning to
do is photograph the kids I've photographed as they become pregnant. One
of the reasons I haven't [done] more is because it so awes me that the
last thing I think about is taking a picture of it. It feels like walking
in church with loud shoes, to take a camera into that place.

Steinberg: Can you give a picture of how you work with people, your process?
Are you directive?

Sturges: If I've been working with a family for years, it's very
different
from when I'm working with somebody for the first time. When I'm working
with
people for the first time, I always tell them that I have no expectations of
taking any good pictures. Otherwise they're going to feel awkward, selfconscious;
they're going to want to know what to do with their hands. It
usually takes a couple of shoots before we get past that.
I shoot a lot of pictures that I consider pictures I have to take to get to
the pictures I want to take. I have to deal with people's preconceptions
about how one is photographed. If someone comes to take your picture, you
stand there and you pose and you smile, that kind of thing. After a while,
people will be taking a break and I'll say, "Don't move," and get a good
picture, when they really aren't thinking about it.

The less I direct, the better. People who pose models are really not
paying attention to what's beautiful about our species, because poses by
definition are limited to the archetypes in our head about how someone
should look in a picture. All of which has very little to do,
unfortunately, with how we are. People do the most beautiful things
imaginable; the less I direct the better.

For me an ideal shoot is with people I've worked with for a long time.
We'll go to a beach or we'll go to a river and we'll spend days there. I
interrupt nothing. If people want to go swim, they go swim. If they want
to come back, they come back. If they want to leave with their
boyfriends, they leave with their boyfriends. If their boyfriends want to
be there, if they want to listen to the radio, whatever, I say nothing. I
might change a little something, I might turn a head in a larger
composition, or change the direction of eyes. Once in a while I'll say,
"Don't move," and I'll quickly take a picture. The best photographs
always come that way. It's what's the least manipulated and owes the
most, therefore, to what the people themselves have done. All the art in
my work dwells in the subjects; it's all theirs. It's not made up by me;
I ain't that smart.

[This column was originally published in Spectator Magazine (see www.spectator.net). People who would like to receive Comes Naturally columns regularly via
e-mail can do so, free of charge, by sending their names and e-mail
addresses to David Steinberg at <eronat@aol.com>. Columns are sent as
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or address.]

[If you would like to receive Comes Naturally columns, and other writing by
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